Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)(79)

“Clothes,” said Gary. “You try changing when you’re wearing your clothes, and the next thing you know, you’re tangled up in your jeans.”

“At least you don’t have a bra,” I agreed sourly.

“While you were out running around, you got an interesting phone call,” Adam told me, pulling my cell phone out of his back pocket. He hit a button. “Wulfe wants to talk to you.”

I put it up to my ear. If he’d said that last before he’d hit the button, I’d have objected. Jumpy and exhausted are not a good state for talking to Wulfe, Marsilia’s right-hand vampire. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been trying to kill me—and Marsilia, the vampire who ruled all the vamps in the TriCities. There was an outside chance that Wulfe had actually been trying to protect Marsilia, but I had no trouble assigning him as much villainy as seemed to want to cling to him—and a bit more.

“Mercy?” Wulfe’s voice was enough to wake me right up.

“You wanted to talk to me?” I wished I had more of Mary Jo’s glass of water left.

“Mercy,” he whispered. “Mercy. I can still taste you in my mouth.” I pulled the phone away from my ear because I didn’t want his voice that close to me. “I long for your blood on my tongue, little coyote-girl.”

Creepy. Of all the creepy people and monsters I’ve encountered—and a lot of monsters are pretty creepy—Wulfe is the one who gets to me the worst. I think it’s because he scares me the most. I had been thinking about drinking, and he started talking about it, as though he was reading my mind. He does that kind of thing a lot. He knows it bothers me, and that just encourages him.

“And I can see you turning to dust in the middle of the afternoon under the hot summer sun,” I told him, trying to sound bored. I did a pretty good job. Exhaustion and boredom sound a lot alike. “If your dream comes true, then mine gets to come true, too.”

“Life is not so fair, Mercy,” he said, and someone in the same room with him made a noise.

Any adult who has ever watched a porn flick knows that noise. It’s the one that real people don’t make unless they are faking something.

“If you just called to flirt, I’m hanging up.”

He drew in a shaky breath, then moaned.

I hung up.

“Who was that, and why was he having phone sex with you?” asked Gary.

“I need to wash my brain,” muttered Darryl. “Next time I see that vampire, I’m going to squish him like a bug.”

“I feel violated,” I said, half-seriously.

The phone rang, and I set it on the table. It rang again, and we all looked at it.

Adam picked it up and hit the green button on the screen.

“Mercy, you spoil all my fun,” Wulfe said, sounding less psychotic and more petulant. “You keep killing my playmates. It’s only fair that you take their place.”

I don’t know which playmates he was talking about. Andre? Frost? Frost was the last vampire I’d killed.

“No,” said Adam, as if Wulfe had been asking a question.

“I told you I’ll only talk to Mercy,” said Wulfe, dropping into singsong. “I know something you don’t know.”

“What?” asked Adam.

“I have news about a man who was looking for a house this week with room for his dogs. He paid cash. Lots of cash.”

“Where?” asked Adam.

“Oh dear,” Wulfe said. “You don’t think I’m going to tell you, do you? I could have told you an hour ago.”

Adam looked at me. I took the phone. Coyote said that Guayota and his dogs had killed again tonight. This wasn’t just about Christy anymore. Guayota needed to be stopped.

“It’s me,” I said. “But if you keep screwing with us, I’ll call Stefan and see if he can’t figure out what your news is.”

Marsilia, the mistress of the local vampire seethe, was courting Stefan with as much delicacy as a Victorian gentleman courted his chosen lady. He’d been her most loyal follower for centuries, and she’d broken the ties between them with brutal thoroughness in order to maintain control of her seethe. Now that he was finally talking to her again, if he asked her for information, she’d give it to him. Even if it was for me.

There was a little silence on the line. Then Wulfe said, sounding hurt, which was absurd, “I have no reason to help you, Mercy. One of my sheep brought me some interesting-for-you information. But if you aren’t going to be nice, you don’t get it.”

Vampires.

“Nice how?” I asked.

“Come to my house tonight,” he purred. “You remember where it is, right? I’ll give you my information if you play well enough.”

“She isn’t going alone,” said Adam.

“Oh no,” agreed Wulfe. “Nothing says fun like an Alpha werewolf. Just you two, though.”

I was going to be a zombie for the meeting with the lawyer and the cops tomorrow. Adam would have to do all the talking for me—he’d had about ten minutes more sleep than I had. But if Wulfe knew something, anything that would give us an advantage over Guayota, we needed to find out what it was. In less than a week, he’d killed who knows how many people. The official report, according to Adam’s private investigator in Eugene, was that four had died in the fire Guayota had started in Christy’s condo. There were all those women in the field in Finley and however many he’d killed tonight. Coyote had said Guayota wouldn’t stop until he was stopped.